]]>Sony’s PlayStation Network is back up and running after a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that overwhelmed its servers.

The company said in a blog post early Monday that, despite the attack, it had “seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users’ personal information.” So this isn’t a repeat of the big PlayStation Network breaches of 2011, which saw the theft of personal details of millions of users.

Sony said in its post that it would forgo scheduled network maintenance that had been scheduled for Monday, and apologized to its users for the inconvenience of the downtime.

In DDoS attacks, the attackers flood the target’s servers with data until they can no longer cope, either disrupting or outright killing the service they’re providing.

It seems there may be a link between the PlayStation Network DDoS and a Sunday bomb threat that diverted an American Airlines flight carrying Sony Online Entertainment chief John Smedley. A Twitter account belonging to “Lizard Squad” made the threat, specifically referring to Smedley, and also suggested that whoever is behind the account was also directing the DDoS attack.

The motive, apparently, is Sony’s alleged lack of investment in the PlayStation Network:

]]>https://gigaom.com/2014/08/25/sony-playstation-network-back-up-after-ddos-associated-with-plane-bomb-threat/feed/2The Tester: Sony’s secret reality TV hithttps://gigaom.com/2012/02/05/the-tester-season-3/
https://gigaom.com/2012/02/05/the-tester-season-3/#commentsMon, 06 Feb 2012 05:00:14 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=480957Fear Factor: Sony's competitive reality TV show The Tester is a big hit with gamers, who have been watching the show through the PlayStation Network. The Tester's third season, which starts this week, will for the first time also stream on the web.

]]>Reality TV show The Tester attracts hundreds of thousands of viewers per episode — but if you’re not a gamer, you’ve probably never even heard of it. That’s because The Tester has been running exclusively on Sony’s PlayStation Network, where last season, each episode was viewed 352,000 times on average.

PlayStation Network executive producer of original programming Kevin Furuichi told me during a phone conversation last week that The Tester’s third season, which begins this Tuesday, will for the first time be available for streaming on the web as well, which should result in even bigger viewership numbers. “We are really excited that we are able to deliver an audience,” Furuichi told me.

Check out the trailer below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=413N_FTYWxI]

The Tester has twelve gamers competing in challenges that look like a mixture of Fear Factor and real-life video games, and the winner will get a job as a Production Associate in Sony’s Santa Monica video game development studio. Furuichi told me that his team initially tried to make The Tester look more like a web series, with shorter, snack-sized episodes. But the audience actually wanted to see more, so now the show is running half an hour per episode, much like a traditional TV show. Furuichi readily admitted that Sony learned some things from traditional TV production for The Tester: “It is not about changing reality TV,” he said.

So why does Sony produce original programming like The Tester for its PlayStation Network audience? It obviously works well as branded entertainment; the contestants regularly get to try out new Sony game titles, and even meet a few game industry legends. But Furuichi also said that it’s about adding value to the PlayStation Network in general. “It brings people into the network,” he told me.

]]>Many consumers were never completely sure of the correct way to pronounce it, and it has had mixed success as a household name synonymous with cloud-based entertainment, so it comes as not too much of a surprise to hear that Sony (NYSE: SNE) has now dropped the Qriocity brand. Instead, it is taking the music and video services from Qriocity, combining them with the PlayStation Network for gaming, and putting them under a new brand name, the Sony Entertainment Network.

To be sure, the new name is not exactly streamlined and zippy, and sounds confusingly similar to one of Sony’s existing product divisions:

Sony Entertainment Network will encompass Video on Demand powered by Qriocity, which will now be called simply Video Unlimited; and Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity, which will become Music Unlimited; and the PlayStation Network. The changes were detailed by Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, at the IFA show in Berlin, Germany, today.

While the rebranding could simplify the Sony’s cloud entertainment offerings to the market, it will also have the added bonus of taking away a name that became synonymous with the hacking scandal that hit Sony earlier this year, in which millions of accounts were compromised around the world and the network shut down for weeks, and which it says will result in a “signficant decrease” in sales this year.

In the publicity around those two tablets, Sony touted the many entertainment services it had in place that would link up with the new devices, including Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited — without mentioning the Qriocity brand.

In addition to being available on Sony’s tablets, Sony announced today that Music Unlimited will also start to be offered in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands and Belgium by the end of this year.

]]>Google’s standoff with China over censorship in search in 2010 was a lowpoint in the search engine’s ambitions to expand to the East, but a new scuffle over email hacking could do that +1.

Yesterday, Google said in a blog post that hackers in China have gained access to hundreds of email addresses for U.S. and South Korean government officials as well as military personnel, Chinese political activists and journalists. Google said it had detected the event, likely perpetrated through a phishing scam, using its cloud-based security services, and that it they appeared to originate from Jinan, China, although it has not identified who might be responsible. It says that it has now disrupted the activity.

Perhaps all too aware of the disaster that has hit Sony (NYSE: SNE) with its PlayStation and Qriocity hacking problems — which only now seem to be clearing up enough now for Sony to relaunch its PlayStation Store in selected markets — Eric Grosse, Google’s engineering director who penned the post, emphasized that Google’s own internal systems had not been affected by the hack.

But even if the phishing attack has been neutralized, it doesn’t look like the China issue will be going away soon for Google (NSDQ: GOOG).

Today, the Chinese government denied Google’s accusations and called the claims “completely unfounded“, claiming that it too had been the subject of hacking, which it is investigating.

China is an undeniably ripe opportunity for Google not just in terms of online growth but also in other significant areas like mobile.

Android is a fast-growing platform in the country, with several Chinese handset makers now developing low-cost smartphones using the Google OS.

It’s an area that others are vying for, too, of course: Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is reportedly looking at developing an iPhone that works on the country’s homegrown mobile data standards, fuelled by news that Chinese consumers are iPhone-crazy. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has finally created a Chinese-friendly edition of Windows Phone, which is getting developed by ZTE and many others for the Chinese market. Meanwhile, Nokia (NYSE: NOK), which has had a commanding lead in mobile in China, has now cautioned investors that those results will not be as stellar in the year ahead.

Google’s search activities have already been limited as a result of its compromise with China to continue operating there: in return for no censorship from China, Google can only show music, products and translation, but not web pages. Incidents like this one with Gmail show that the two are not on an even keel, however, and that could be a bad sign for how it will grow in the country in the future.

]]>Sony (NYSE: SNE) concedes the outage caused by the hacks of its PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will lead 2011/12 income to “significantly decrease” in its networked products and services division.

Reporting a fivefold wider annual loss of 259 billion yen for 2010/11 on Thursday, Sony said lower PSP and PS3 console and game sales will also hurt the division.

However, despite launching its Qriocity online media services network globally in the last year, divisional revenue actually slipped 1.2 percent to 1.5 billion yen. The division did swing back from the previous year’s loss, however.

“The network strategy is one of Sony’s most important strategies, and Sony will continue to contribute to the protection of personal information and the development of a secure and sound networked society, while further strengthening the information control structure for the entire Sony group,” the company said.

]]>Those clouds over Sony (NYSE: SNE) are getting darker. The company has admitted yet another compromise of people’s private information, with this latest breach affecting over 25 million people, and now people are starting to wonder if, and when, heads are going to roll.

The latest breach, of accounts linked to the Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) gaming service, has an even more alarming set of numbers attached to it than the breach announced last week around the PlayStation Network and Sony’s on-demand entertainment service, Qriocity.

“personal information from approximately 24.6 million SOE accounts may have been stolen, as well as certain information from an outdated database from 2007. The information from the outdated database that may have been stolen includes approximately 12,700 non-U.S. credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates (but not credit card security codes), and about 10,700 direct debit records of certain customers in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain.”

This newest leak was apparently discovered during checks that Sony was making around last week’s problems, and it looks like this theft happened at the same time as those from PSN and Qriocity.

The company closed down the SOE network, including Sony’s Facebook games, after it discovered the problem yesterday. The SOE service, along with the PlayStation Network and Qriocity, continue to remain closed for now.

This latest revelation — while once again casting a big shadow on the security of cloud-based services — is also leading to some more dark looks at the company, namely in the form of blame, and asking who should be held responsible for these problems. Some investors are even calling for the resignation of Howard Stringer, the company’s CEO, adding accusations of being unable to handle this security crisis to existing criticisms over the competitiveness in the company’s product portfolio.

It hasn’t helped, either, that Sony yesterday declined to appear at a Congressional hearing on data theft and the impact on American consumers. (The Times notes that it is, however, providing some responses to the committee running the hearing; it could not attend due to its own ongoing investigation into the attacks, it claimed.)

As of yet, there have not been any announcements made about how this data may have been used, and who may have been behind this breach.

Sony has, however, admitted that there may be more to come. “They are hackers. We don’t know where they’re going to attack next,” a spokesperson told Reuters.

Unlike last week’s PSN and Qriocity breaches, Sony has not yet issued any guidance to affected users about what steps to take next in terms of safeguarding themselves. Here is the full list of details stolen from the Sony Online Entertainment service:

And the 10,700 direct debit records from accounts in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain, had this additional information taken:

bank account number
customer name
account name
customer address

Worth noting, too, that even though Sony calls the databases from 2007 “outdated”, there is a high chance that affected users will still have kept the same banking details that they did four years ago. Sony is offering users 30 days’ compensation, plus credit for each day the network remains closed. Nevertheless, a disastrous turn of events for the company.

]]>Updated. Online video services Netflix, Hulu Plus and MLB.tv have been hard hit by an ongoing outage of Sony’s PlayStation Network, which has been down since last Wednesday. Sony took the network for its gaming console offline last week after hackers gained access to customer data. The company admitted the breach Tuesday and said it expects “to restore some services within a week.”

PlayStation 3 users haven’t just been locked out of online games, but also have been unable to access video services like Netflix or Hulu Plus, which both require a PlayStation Network subscription. Also unavailable are VOD rentals from Sony’s PlayStation store, as well as programming from MLB.tv. Vudu rentals, on the other hand, are accessible without any issue, we confirmed this week, which suggests the Walmart-owned download store interacts differently with the Playstation Network than Netflix and Hulu Plus.

While online video services like Netflix and Hulu Plus have rapidly increased the number of consumer electronics devices they are available on, game consoles still represents a large percentage of viewing. Netflix, for instance, claims to be available on more than 250 different devices, but the PS3 is definitely one of the more dominant players. Sony’s PlayStation Network has more than 70 million users worldwide, and the console maker had sold close to 18 million PS3s in the U.S. alone by the end of last year. Just for comparison’s sake, Roku has sold a little more than a million of its broadband set-top boxes.

The outage is particularly cruel for Netflix users, who are able to launch the Netflix UI after going through a number of failed attempts to log into the Playstation Network. Users are able to select a title for streaming, and the application even starts buffering the stream. However, another log-in window pops up, and the app throws the user back into the catalog overview after the log-in fails. Check the video embedded below for all the depressing details:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7L-enQzS7w]

A Netflix spokesperson told us the company is redirecting any requests by end users who inquire about the issue to Sony. Hulu wasn’t available for comment at the time of writing, but the company has reportedly started to offer refunds to some of its customers to make up for the fact that they can’t access the service on their PS3.

Update: Judging from our comments, some people have been able to access Netflix streams despite the PlayStation Network outage. However, we tried multiple times yesterday without success, and also talked to a number of users who ran into the same issues described above. Individual results may vary.

]]>This cloud doesn’t have much of a silver lining right now: Sony (NYSE: SNE) has closed down two of its media services, its PlayStation Network for gaming and its Qriocity entertainment service, after a malicious intrusion resulted in a “compromise of personal information” on the two cloud-based networks. The news will do little to help the image of cloud services as security nightmares, and ironically comes on the same day that Sony formally announced its first two media tablets — devices that hinge on services like Qriocity and the PlayStation Network both to attract users and to provide recurring revenue streams for the device makers.

About an hour ago, Sony released a blog post saying that it hopes to have the two services restored by the end of the week. It also, for the first time, provided some more detail about what happened:

We believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

The PlayStation Network is a service that lets users play against other players on the network, as well as chat to each other. The Qriocity service, meanwhile, is Sony’s new cloud-based digital entertainment venture, offering users music, TV shows, films and other entertainment streamed to various Sony devices. The company has not provided any numbers on how many subscribers Qriocity has today, but the PlayStation Network connects some 75 million users internationally.

The outage actually goes back to last week, when Sony identified that an external intrustion on the system that runs the PlayStation Network and Qriocity. Since closing down, Sony has seen tens of thousands of comments from users on its PSN Facebook page and on Twitter. Now that it’s admitted the possibility of a serious data leak, those comments are likely to get a little angrier.

Sony is advising users to be more vigilant about their account statements and credit reports; to make sure not to provide any personal information to anyone requesting it in connection with Sony; and to change all passwords when the services are restored.

]]>Apple isn’t the only consumer electronics company allegedly planning to unveil a streaming service today; according to a report in the Financial Times, Sony will also announce its own streaming and video subscription service that will be available across a wide range of devices.

The service will initially draw on the customer base Sony has built up through users logged into its PlayStation Network on PS3 and PSP gaming devices, but the PlayStation Network will be just the starting point for the new service. According to the FT, streaming video and audio could also become available on Sony “Walkman music players, Vaio computers, Bravia TVs, Blu-ray players and Sony Ericsson mobile phones” in the future.

The Sony service is expected to launch next year, as connectivity across Sony devices proliferates. The FT reports that Sony president Howard Stringer “said last year that 90 percent of Sony products would be able to connect to each other and the Internet by 2011.”

This isn’t Sony’s first foray into offering up a digital storefront for media on its devices; it previously launched a service called Sony Connect that sold DRM-protected music files that were only accessible on Sony products. The service proved unsuccessful and was shuttered in 2007, leaving Apple to take over the digital music scene with iTunes.

This time around, Sony will face significant competition from Apple again, as the latter is expected to announce streaming capabilities at an event held this morning in San Francisco, Calif. More on that event later.

Both announcements are apparently imminent, with the Journal reporting that the paid service could start as early as “later this month,” Kafka agreeing that it could start “next week” and Bloomberg saying that the cooperation would Sony “could be announced as soon as next week.”

There have been rumors about Hulu Plus for months now, and first reports about an iPad app surfaced in March. However, details are still scarce. Here’s what we do know:

The service will cost $9.95 per month.

It will offer access to a larger back catalog of content.

It will run on additional devices currently not supported by Hulu, including Apple’s iPad and potentially Microsoft’s Xbox as well as Sony’s Playstation.

Hulu’s basic service will remain free for all of its users.

Hulu Plus may also eventually offer access to shows that previously weren’t available on Hulu, with rumors pointing towards negotiations with CBS. Viacom, who just removed all of its content from Hulu a few months ago, also signaled that it was willing to rethink its stance on Hulu if and when the economic model of the site changes.

However, it’s doubtful that any of these potential content partners will be available as part of a launch next week, which will reportedly be rolled out as a closed beta test limited to as few as 10,000 subscribers.